Cigarette Smoke
by Gabi Howard
Summary: Mello is the firebrand, blazing and furious and working desperately, and Matt is... well. Matt is whatever comes after that, and that suits him just fine.


His first school has a proper uniform, and while some of the boys pick elasticated ties, Mail's father won't hear of it.

_It looks a mess, boy- no class at all._

Mail bites back the comment on how they're working class anyway, who does he think he's fooling? It never goes down well with his parents, and he gets the feeling that his Dad hasn't been working class very long from the way they talk about his rich grandfather when they think he's in bed, so he sits down with his mother and she teaches him how to stitch a name tag to a tie. It's more annoying than shirts or trousers, but he gets it done with only 8 pricks of the finger to show for it, which in all honesty don't hurt all that much. His mother looks pleased with him anyway, and that's good enough for him.

-

Wammy's has no ties, he discovers, after he stays at home to read a book one day and so avoids being crushed beyond recognition when an 18-wheeler flattens the family car. He's left his parents to rest in peace under a plain bit of grey stone (there was barely enough to afford that) and come to England with an old man who looks a tiny bit like his grandfather, only not such a Stingy Bastard from the looks of things, and not confined to a tiny photo buried in the attic. The old man says he's going to become the next L, which Mail thinks is a little odd- he doesn't know much about L, but his father talked about him a lot and by the sound of it, he doesn't need replacing just yet- but they give him the Playstation his parents never had the money for, and a new name (Matt), and a room that's okay really, and so settling down to get the extra work he's meant to do done doesn't seem so unfair. It takes his mind off the fact that his mother's gone, at least.

By the time he realises that they tell _everyone_ that they're going to be the next L, it's come to matter just enough that the discovery breaks him a tiny bit inside. Just a hairline fracture, somewhere deep down. He ignores it, and the questions of why he doesn't seem to be so motivated any more. "I don't fucking know," gets him a week's worth of detentions, but it's true- the break's not enough to have done it. It's just that he can't seem to work like before.

-

He tries his first cigarette when he's seven and a half, and bunking off football to sit in a field with some of the older boys and Linda. He takes the drag to look cool, she declines after he nearly chokes on it, and he's needled about the whole matter for the rest of the day. It tasted alright though, Matt reckons, and it takes everybody's mind off the way that A keeps twitching and glancing back to the house. Matt looks that way once himself, and only sees a shadow in the window. B likes doing that- making you feel like he's not there even as he messes everything up- and Matt's learned to steer well clear. The lesson is further hammered home the next morning, when Linda finds A's body swinging from a bedsheet noose and _screams_.

Matt takes advantage of the chaos to pocket the cigarettes lying on the desk before Roger gets there. He'll miss the guy and all, but waste not want not, right?

-

He's a little disconcerted, just over a year later, to find a catatonic blonde boy on his top bunk when he gets back from maths, but he shrugs it off and goes to play Mario, figuring that the intruder will leave before long. He doesn't, though, and after an hour or so, Matt feels eyes on his back and looks up to see the boy staring at him, wide-eyed, still on his bunk. He doesn't answer when Matt says hello, so he turns around and keeps playing until lights out, by which point the boy's asleep. He considers waking him up and chucking him out for a moment, but decides against it and takes the bottom bunk for the night.

In the morning he finds out that the intruder's nickname is Mellow, because he has a temper. Roger looks in to say that he's permanent, and to give him a chocolate bar for breakfast, since it's obvious he's not coming down. Over the following months, Matt also discovers Mellow's real name (Mihael), shortens his nickname to Mello to tease him after some of the littlest kids kept forgetting to write the w on the end and eases him out of the catatonia by teaching him how to play video games.

He won't find out that Mello was the one to (accidentally) start the fire that reduced his family's caravans to dust until the boy's lying on a threadbare sofa in LA, burning with fever and singing like a bird.

-

He misses L's talk after he gets caught sneaking into F's room to steal his cigarettes. The punishment for the mistake is to stay in his room for the evening, though by this point he's almost entirely abandoned the idea of being the next L. He does enough work to get him by, nothing more, and he knows he'll get a full overview when Mello gets in.

He is not disappointed. The other boy storms into the room (which he wasn't expecting) and launches into a tirade against _fucking hypocrites who can't even be bothered to show their faces. He doesn't care, Matt, he doesn't care!_

Matt watches him, nods in a sympathetic sort of way and watches with quiet amusement over the next few days as Mello throws himself into his work like never before.

-

He hears about L's death in much the same way as his betrayal. Mello storms in and screams this time, screams about Kira and _how dare he_ and _you wait, I'll get revenge, he'll wish he was never fucking_ born_ when I'm done with him_, and crawls into bed when he's done, still fuming. Matt carries right on playing video games until gone lights out, when he flops into his bed. Mello hasn't moved, and he figures he's asleep.

He's not. Come the morning, all that's left is a note. Near just shrugs and carries on like normal- though he's in his room more often than before- and Matt is crushed for the two months it takes him to get his act together and start looking for Mello. He's never going to be L, but it would be beyond useless to let what skills he's learnt here sit and rot.

He leaves the House ten months later, finds Mello within the year, and while things are different in every possible way to what they were on the night of November 24th, there's something ridiculously comforting about the way they settle back into role. Mello is the firebrand, blazing and furious and working desperately, and Matt is... well. Matt is whatever comes after that, and that suits him just fine.

-

There's girls in the Mafia. Loads of them, and after Mello starts getting their particular gang respect, they flock to him. One goes to Matt, though- gives him a slyer look than the others, winks and settles herself right inside his personal space, and he doesn't like it one bit. It's not that he's inexperienced, even though he is (unless you count that one time with Linda in a particularly dense clump of bushes, but that was a fumble really, nothing proper), just that it's not her he wants at all. He's been fine with cigarette smoke for years, but suddenly the fumes in the room feel overwhelming because there's perfume and shit too, and he can't stay, he really can't, he has to get _out_.

Mello finds him on the roof at the end of the night, cigarette dangling from his fingers as he stares up at where the stars should be. _How did we get here?_ He wants to ask. _Why are we doing this? _But he knows, of course, and so he says nothing. The perfume clinging to Mello's clothes is revolting, but there's the tiniest bit of satisfaction in the way he seems to think so too. It's just that... well, it's the end of the night. And it keeps on being the end of the night that Mello looks for Matt until a Death God lands in their midst, and then he hardly bothers finding him at all, except to tell him plans when nobody else would understand, and one time when Matt gets to actually take part.

He jumps on that one. It's ridiculous, suicidal even, but it gets Mello to look at him again, and Matt could put up with a hell of a lot worse for that.

-

When he gets out of the car, he decides to play it cool. _Seriously though, how many guards does one woman need?_

"Hey, c'mon, gimme a break! Since when were you guys allowed to carry such big guns? Anyway, you got me, fine. So you'll have a lot of questions to ask about my accomplice and shit, right? I mean, it's not like you're going to shoot-"

-or maybe the gun thing didn't apply to bodyguards. Hell if he knew.


End file.
